


Dead Devotion

by juurensha



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-13
Updated: 2015-09-13
Packaged: 2018-04-20 14:29:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4790756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juurensha/pseuds/juurensha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And he asks if it was good to see him, and it is all you can do to not laugh. Seeing Hannibal is many things: heady, bittersweet, tantalizing, like walking barefoot across a field of broken glass to shelter, but never something as simple as good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dead Devotion

You said you were tired, and that you didn’t have his taste, and that was and is true: it feels righteous to kill a bad man; it feels like the dust of nothing to simply kill for cruelty’s sake the way he does. And you had traipsed all over Europe, gotten thrown off trains, shot, and nearly had your face torn away from you all in pursuit of him, and you missed your dogs, your refuge of a house, your quiet peace fishing at the stream. 

There is a simple joy to mixing food for all the dogs, to fixing motor engines with easy, straightforward problems, to waking up and knowing no matter what nightmares haunt your sleep, there are no new ones waiting for you in the harsh light of the day. 

And yet. 

And yet, you sometimes wake up from those with nightmares with not so much a scream as a sense of loss. And yet, there are days when your house in the wilderness seems less like a refuge and more a desolate shell of a memory. And yet, you are not surprised when you walk from the cool grass of your memory stream into the Norman Chapel of Palermo. 

You think you see him standing near the altar, where he had left his broken heart for you to find, but you turn away and walk back to your stream. 

(He turned himself in because you rejected him, and perhaps that was what you had wanted and even subconsciously planned, but he is there in that cage that he had first placed you in, and if that is not justice, what is?) 

If meeting Hannibal was the worst thing that ever happened to you, meeting Molly is the best. She loves strays, she is kind and funny and sweet, and she has the open, sunny smile of a life that if not empty of sorrow, has had little horror in it, at least. 

(Alana used to smile like that. You wonder if it was inevitable that Hannibal would stain everything he has ever encountered. Although, Alana now has Margot and a son, a complete family, but once you have supped with the devil and partaken of his table, you could never undo that, could you? 

And they had _all_ partaken of Hannibal’s table) 

Molly has a son, a son named Walter, a young boy who happily giggles when the dogs pile onto him, who you gently teach to fish, who will not make you think of teacups coming back together or paths not taken. 

She knows about your sordid past (as if she could have missed it; tattlecrime did brisk business, but even the major news networks had picked up and run the story of Hannibal the Cannibal for some time, and you are inexorably part of that story), and still she loves you; she doesn’t want to save or change you, she simply loves _you,_ and when you bend down on one knee, with all your dogs milling around both of you, and proffer up a ring and your devotion, sheer joy shines from her as she says yes and wraps you in her arms. 

And you know, you _know_ that you have used up every drop of luck you ever had to manage to find this woman. 

The wedding is a small one at a courthouse, with both Walter and Winston in attendance (you couldn’t bring all the dogs unfortunately), and Alana and Margot surprise both of you with flowers and fabulously wrapped gifts outside. Jack sends his congratulations, and you even get a congratulatory email from Price and Zeller. 

(Hannibal sends a letter as well a few days later, written on heavy, cream colored stationary with his familiar, copperplate handwriting flourished out in black ink. He must have somehow deduced purely based on whatever remnants of scent that Alana carried of flowers and Molly and you. You consider tossing it into the flames immediately; his words were always his strongest weapon against you, against all his patients, against everyone, but. 

But you open it anyway, holding the letter at arms length, but his words bite you anyway, as you knew they would. Every sentence holds a double meaning, every phrase drips with bitterness and longing, and with each word you read, you feel him draw closer behind you. 

You drop the letter into the fireplace after you are done, and you don’t tell Molly. Some things are better left to fade away into the shadows where they belong) 

The three of you move to a cozy, wood house in the middle of the woods, not far from a stream, and the years pass. A few more strays are picked up, the three of you and all the dogs happily eat and chat around the table every meal, and you have a warm bed at night. 

It’s everything you ever wanted. 

And if sometimes, in your dreams, you walk back into that lofty office where Hannibal held court, well, you had spent a long and very memorable time there. Given enough time, you have to believe that all wounds can eventually heal, even if you’re covered in scars. And when you wake up, shaking from nightmares, and Molly wraps her arms around you and makes comforting noises and kisses you, you really believe that one day, it’ll all be just a memory. 

And you think you could have succeeded, could have been happy, could have kept reading and then burning Hannibal’s elegant, bitter letters, could have made yourself believe that you no longer have to try to save people with your gift, but then the Jacobi and Leed families are slaughtered in a nightmare of blood and mirrors, and Jack comes calling, hoping to once again borrow your imagination. 

Ah, you could blame him, blame the FBI, blame your own fate, but in the end, Jack is always trying to do the right thing, no matter the cost, and you cannot let more families die even if you fear that this time, you will not walk back out of the dark. 

(It was a never a question of whether or not you’d be the same if you managed to return. If there is anything Hannibal has taught you, it is this: you cannot chase after the devil or make yourself a lure, walk into the dark, and tempt the devil, without changing yourself irrevocably. 

You had thought you could when you had just been released, full of righteous wrath and fury and grief over both Abigail and Beverly and with the bedrock of Jack’s support, but the devil is smoke, and Abigail paid the price of your mistake, along with Dr. Fell, Mrs. Fell, Professor Sogliato, Antony Dimmond, Inspector Pazzi, and all the other bodies Hannibal left in his wake throughout Italy. 

But not Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier. Pristine, perfectly coiffed Bedelia, with nary a scar on her smooth skin while you have a smile carved on your belly, a kiss of a saw on your forehead, and a gaping hole where once Abigail, Beverly, and Margot and your unborn, unnamed child once were. 

She was his bride, while you are his favorite toy, and nothing delights Hannibal more than to drop you in dangerous, precarious situations and see what you will do, and you know that’s why he sent his letter warning you to stay away from this case. He knows you will come to him) 

You had hoped you could find the Tooth Fairy by simply stepping into his mind for a bit, (and that had been terrible enough after so long of living in paradise) but when have things ever been so easy for you? Of course all roads lead you back to him. 

His cell is a far cry from the one you had been imprisoned in, and he wears the uniform with more grace than you ever did, but this is all a distraction from his familiar face and voice that has lingered in whispers in echoes of your mind, and the way that he smiles when he realizes that the two of you share rooms of his mind palace. There is a reason that you have not visited him once in the four years he has been imprisoned here, beyond the obvious reasons that you repeat to yourself over and over again. It is too easy to be sucked into his wake, to see and be seen, to bask in his affection. But there are families to be saved and a killer to be punished—no, brought to justice, yes, and so you threaten to leave, and Hannibal quickly deigns to look at the file you have brought him 

(Hannibal tends to forget that affection is a weapon pointed on both ends, even after both of you have bled over it) 

And once again, you remember how well the two of you worked together: he was the one who showed you the negative to see the positive in the Garrett Jacob Hobbs case in exchange for Cassie Boyle, Marissa Schurr, and Nicholas Boyle, and now he walks you through everything about a family that may have the Tooth Fairy strike out at them, and you wonder what the price of that will be, because nothing with Hannibal ever comes freely or easily. 

But still, there is something intoxicating about stepping back into the dark to once again hunt monsters with the Devil himself at your side. (Although, you keep reminding yourself, Hannibal is only ever on the side of his own amusement, no matter his affection for you, and you will forget that at your peril) 

The Tooth Fairy is attacking and killing pets first, but the Leeds family dog is alive, so you take it in, and call Molly, and it is a welcome breath of sanity in the midst of madness, and when you use your gift to see her at your side, you are happy. 

But it doesn’t last, because good things never last with Hannibal, and he has always been very clear about how he feels about the family you managed to find on your own. 

You should have known, should have anticipated it, because after all, Hannibal holds nothing sacred, and certainly not the family he thinks you have found to replace the one he had offered you. (And after all, he took away that family that had also been his dream with one flick of his hand, and how much easier is it for him to try to destroy what is only yours instead?) But somehow you thought they would be safe, kept apart, kept untainted, because after all, they were never a part of this life, and wasn’t that one of the reasons you loved them so much? But it was inevitable as soon as you let yourself be persuaded back into this life that monsters would stalk after them as well, and it is only luck and Molly’s level-headedness and deft skill that you run to the hospital instead of the morgue. 

Molly had promised that she would be the same after you got back, but that was unfair of you to expect that, and when Walter tells you to kill the Dragon that tried to kill them, you fear that you have tainted the one thing that was good and pure in your life. 

And you know your cardinal sin is wrath, but there is no way for you to lash out at Hannibal without harming yourself (affection is a weapon pointed on both ends), and so you bait a trap for the Dragon, slinging every insult that you know will enrage him, dangling yourself once again as a target, but the Dragon chooses to go after Frederick Chilton instead. 

(You have more cause than most to hate the man, but still, you would have never wished his fate upon him. Did you purposefully set him up, like both Bedelia Du Maurier and the man himself accuse you of doing? 

You walked in the Dragon’s mind, the first mind you have walked in years, and you placed your hand on Frederick Chilton’s shoulder, and you were horrified but not surprised at what the Dragon had done to him. 

As Bedelia said, that’s participation) 

Then they say the Dragon is dead, and it is…anti-climatic. Unfulfilling, unsatisfying, uninteresting. And yet, justice has been done isn’t it? The Dragon is dead, and no more families will die, and isn’t that why you came back? But ever since Garrett Jacob Hobbs, here is what you know: you want to protect the innocent, this is true, but killing bad people yourself felt _right_ , and the Dragon just suddenly dead at his own hand felt _wrong._

Still, you comfort the woman who drew a man with a freak on his back (at least, what comfort you can give as the man who drew the devil himself), and then you smooth back your hair and go back to the Norman Chapel of Palermo, back to him, one last time. 

(For now anyway, although you don’t tell him that. He mocks you, telling you to think of him when life becomes maddeningly polite, and you and he both know you’re not sure how much you can salvage of the old life you built without him. Home is no longer the refuge it once was. So you put your hand to the glass and tell him that you rejected him on purpose, knowing that that was the only way to bring him here. 

And that has both the glinting fragments of truths and lies, because you were so _tired_ , but another part of you that had felt the latch of Hannibal’s memory palace and walked its halls had had an idea about what he would do if you told him that you wanted him to be nothing more than a ghost of a memory 

And he asks if it was good to see him, and it is all you can do to not laugh. Seeing Hannibal is many things: heady, bittersweet, tantalizing, like walking barefoot across a field of broken glass to shelter, but never something as simple as good.) 

But, it turns out the reports of the Dragon’s demise were greatly exaggerated, and you are once again making deals with yet another monster that has found you for Hannibal’s death. 

(No other roads forward; you are tainted, you have been ever since you met him and the ravenstag began walking at your side. One way or another, you are ridding the world of at least two monsters soon) 

You tell Jack to dangle Hannibal as bait, and you are sure Jack sees through you (he remembers what happened last time the two of you tried to fish together), but still he agrees. The only one who protests is Dr. Du Maurier, and she is in no position to stop you. Of course you have to be the one to ask Hannibal, and so you smile and lower your eyes, and he smiles back at you, all languid pleasure and malicious glee and the havoc the two of you will wreak. 

Nothing goes according to plan, but Hannibal is in his element, wrenching off his mask and straightjacket and breathing in the blood-stained air with a pleasant smile. He dances upon the waves of chaos, and so you join him, arriving at the house that he had planned to whisk both you and Abigail to. 

You drink a glass of the bottle of wine he unearths (isn’t it the same as the one you brought him so long ago before either of you had truly seen each other?), and then the Dragon shoots through the glass, and this time it’s Hannibal lying on the floor, bleeding from the gut. 

But for all that you had told Hannibal that you would watch as the Dragon transformed him, you can no more let that fate befall him as you could let him be tortured to death at Muskrat Farm. And he hates the idea of you coming to harm outside of his games with you, so he comes to your aid, and together, the two of you rip the Dragon apart, blood black in the moonlight, and it is _beautiful_. 

(There is no saving you now, if there ever was. There is no saving either of you, so you will be Bluebeard’s last wife) 

So at last you give in, you sink into his chest, and you clutch him close, and you close your eyes, (can’t live with him, can’t live without him), and simply _breathe_ , letting him cradle you gently. 

(Let whatever god that has abandoned you allow you to have at least this one good moment with him) 

And maybe he knows what you’re about to do, but he nuzzles your head anyway, and you tighten your arm around his neck, with a slight _push_ you both 

fall. 


End file.
